Cockburn on Wartime England

* Re “Remembrances of War and Summer,” Commentary, May 28:

Alexander Cockburn was 3 years old on D-Day. What can he possibly remember of the war years before that day--the years of Britain’s finest hour, when she stood alone against the apparently invincible might of Nazi Germany at the time of the Battle of Britain (before Cockburn was born).

I was 15 and remember well the fantastic, unquenchable and unconquerable spirit of the ordinary people. Their confidence in ultimate victory and their support of and concern for each other has not been matched before or since. When the war ended, I was a pilot in the RAF and felt sorry that now everyone would revert to the dog-eat-dog society of “peace.” How right I was, and how much I sometimes yearn for that wartime spirit.

Winston Churchill played out? What despicable rot to write about a truly revered national leader and international hero. I lost three brothers and my father due to the war. I don’t dislike summer, I naturally dislike militaristic and overbearing Germans, and--for his disgusting diatribe--I thoroughly despise Cockburn.

COLIN S.R. MARSHALL

San Juan Capistrano

*

Cockburn proudly mentions that his father was a Red, and as a result the British did not let him go to “the north of Scotland.” I wonder whether Cockburn knows what his father’s attitude was toward the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which allied Nazi Germany to the USSR and thus every Red throughout the world. Does he think that perhaps there was a good reason for the British, already at war with the Nazis, to mistrust any self-proclaimed Red? Of course Cockburn’s father got on the Nazi death list, but that was long after Churchill and half of England did.

IRWIN GROSSMAN

Los Angeles